JRuby 1.4.0 Released

Monday, November 02 2009

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.4.0

After three very helpful release candidates we have a final 1.4.0 release.
This release ends a long release cycle in which we resolved a huge number of
issues. The headline feature is a move to Ruby 1.8.7 support, in line with
Rails’ own plans to make 1.8.7 the required minimum version of Ruby.

We have also gotten more serious about out 1.9 support (–1.9). The
bigger applications mostly just work at this point, but we still have a
ways to go on 1.9 support. Please try your 1.9 code in JRuby and help us
firm things up.

1.4.0 Highlights:

JRuby is now compatible with 1.8.7 patchlevel 174

Windows Native Launcher

Solves many reported bugs with our old .bat scripts

New YAML parser Yecht (bug-for-bug compatible with Syck!)

Improved Java Integration Support

faster

new java_method, java_send, and java_alias methods

Windows installer

New embedding framework

Java 6 scripting out of the box

New org.jruby.embed package to supersede JavaEmbedUtils

Many 1.9 mode (–1.9) fixes

updated stdlib to 1.9.2preview2

Rubygems now working

Rails 2.3.3 simple apps working (2.3.4 has 1.9 bug)

rubygems 1.3.5

Much better error reporting

shorter backtraces with less Java

Ruby-compatiable syntax error reporting

307 bugs fixed since 1.3.1

We want to thank all the users who have been helping us to get a better
release out. Special thanks to Hiro Asari, David Calavera, and
Roger Pack for their recent activity in the project. We also want to
welcome Yoko Harada as a committer to the project. Her work and
support of our embedding efforts has been great.